“Thinking is difficult. That’s why most people judge.”
-Carl Gustav Jung
My life has become a very surreal landscape in recent months, and that shit seems to be getting weirder and weirder. What began as a simple quest to confront the terrifying emotional flashbacks that seemed to increase in frequency and intensity with gender transition has now turned into a veritable psychedelic thrill journey into the third ring of the subconscious mind. , I really want to get out of there. Long story short: I made the fateful decision to stare down a rabbit hole, and the rabbit hole swallowed me whole like an Old Testament sea monster.
Long story short: After decades of trying to escape a past filled with blank spots, dissociation, and complete amnesia, I stopped running and decided to confront my demons head-on with polite conversation. I decided. I did this through an unconventional treatment approach known as parts work. This approach encourages you to actually communicate with the voices in your head, rather than treating them. This challenge becomes more complex when two of my voices, a traumatized 5-year-old girl named Agnes and a 14-year-old androgynous outlaw named Max, turn out to be full-fledged thinking humans. It went from something to something completely mind-boggling. Opinions, grievances, and parts of yourself.
The word for this experience is multiplicity, but most people know this concept as dual personality, a condition in which multiple identities share a single body. Different people experience this condition in different ways, but for me Max and Agnes exist mostly outside of my body. I have no hallucinations, but I can clearly see them in my mind’s eye, even close to the clothes they wear today, and I can have full conversations with them just like I would with anyone else.
Things change when PTSD is triggered. When this happens, I find myself becoming Max or Agnes, experiencing the trauma from their perspective, regaining memories I had repressed, or feeling and understanding fully at first. You can experience old memories that separated you from things.
In the process, I came to believe that both of these girls represented an attempt by me to construct a functioning self in childhood, an attempt that collapsed under the weight of overwhelming trauma. . Agnes was a girl who tried to tell the adults around me that she was not a boy through her acting. When her attempts to reveal herself are met with violence and rejection, followed by unspeakable acts of systematic sexual abuse at the hands of the Catholic Church, she is completely unsafe to exist. She came to that conclusion and annihilated herself. It caused me to disconnect from myself for most of my childhood.
Max came out as his adolescence coincided with the popular farce known as the War on Terror. Max, who had no conscious memories of Agnes, believes that all adults given the ability to control her identity are willfully ignorant and morally corrupt, leading to the scourge in the Middle East based on obvious lies. While cheering, I saw a world where the bodies of innocent children were being sacrificed. It piled up. Max was furious. Max discovered anarchism and punk rock, and for the first time in my memory I had my own voice that belonged to no one else.
But the adults once again claimed final say, accusing me of being a monster and planning acts of mass violence against other innocent children. Teachers, parents, and priests all agreed. They were all discussing how to respond to my indiscretion. It all felt frighteningly familiar to comprehend. Max hid behind the persona of a psychotic antihero and, like Agnes, disappeared.
Parts work did not create them. They were always with me. But it gave them permission to exist and define themselves in a way that the wonderful people who raised me in the shadow of the Vatican refused. They had a story to tell and finally someone willing to listen. So they became permanently sentient participants in my presence, and as crazy as this whole experience was, it was incredibly rewarding in its less diabolical moments. There were also some.
Nicky, Max and Agnes formed an internal axis dedicated to confronting those who persecuted us and enacting revolutionary revenge in response. One becomes three, and these three share the burden of experiencing a past so bad that they had to paralyze themselves in order to survive. I’m feeling it all right now, and sometimes it’s too bad, but I don’t have to feel it alone. We all grow stronger in turn. Agnes is clearly the weakest, but there were many times when she would hold me late at night, crying and shaking, telling me that she would protect me from all the bad white-collar men.
I’ve written a lot about this before on this forum. Because writing is the only way I know how to respond when the world becomes incredibly evil. I fully expected these revelations to be a bridge too far, even for my poor job and dear assholes in my audience, but the actual reaction was, to say the least, quite It was shocking. Not only did I receive an outpouring of messages of support and solidarity for my situation, but many people both inside and outside of Parts shared incredibly similar experiences. In a world rife with warmongers and pedophile priests, I realized that my daughters and I were not alone. There are many other strange little internal family systems on Earth fighting the good fight.
Sadly, not all of the responses I received were that inspiring, in fact, the worst responses were from people I wasn’t expecting to receive. Many people are diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. The only multiplicity recognized by mental health organizations, they slammed me for appropriating their sacred illness because my experience was not approved by the DSM.
Heartbreakingly, this includes people very close to me, people I consider family, whose rejection has driven me to the brink of suicide. The only people who kicked the razor blades in my head were those two angry girls in my head who told me there was too much church before she went to bed They burned it down.
But then again, my daughters and I are not alone. Ignorant of the isolation created by technology, a thriving online movement has emerged in which lonely and traumatized children attempt to split their identities into multiple personas in order to cope with a collapsing civilization. ing. A community of spiritual mind-aviators who call themselves Tulpamancers. Its name comes from the ancient Tibetan Buddhist method of achieving enlightenment through multiplicity.
Like me, these tulpamancers have been heavily ridiculed by those who have received the diagnosis. but why? Unlike most of these kids, I didn’t choose my personality, it was my unspeakable trauma that chose me. But so what? These people found a way to achieve self-love and peace of mind without suffering years of medical abuse like I did, and I end up spitting on them for that. I am. Damn you. I’m proud of them.
Speaking as a queer person, there’s a word for this kind of jump-started oppression Olympics, and it’s called gatekeeping. “You can’t be queer because you’re not gay enough, you can’t be trans because you’re not feminist enough, you can’t be plural because you’re not dissociative enough…” It’s all the same shit, and it’s a big This is a counter-revolutionary trap.
Every time a new minority succeeds in breaking free from the system that oppresses us, that same system rewards them with trinkets of tolerance, such as diagnosis, and holds them back in exchange for service that tramples on the next minority. Trying to assimilate it into the collective consciousness. This is not the point of a truly authentic liberation movement. Points are free. The key is to transform all identities into voluntary tools of radical individualism. The point is not to join the majority, but to destroy the majority through diversity by teaching everyone how to become an autonomous and independent minority. A million tribes of a billion individuals with a trillion personalities fill the ranks in our anarchic parade.
I have come to accept what others call my mental illness as a kind of spiritual martial art. How to protect my individuality from the trauma inflicted on me by the armies of assimilation: church, school, prison, state. I celebrate my madness as a tool for liberation. An ancient weapon used for centuries by prophets, monks, and shamans. And we welcome everyone to join us in this wonderful journey of mental illness. Then we can all celebrate our diversity over the graves of immoral civilizations that have outlived whatever malignant intentions they once had. As the old order crumbles and a new disorder rises like a phoenix from the ashes, let the voices in our heads unite like a cry.
